Thursday, August 27, 2015

BAUAW NEWSLETTER, THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 2015

Join us to plan for a mass march and rally leading up to the Paris COP21* UN climate talks.

Thursday, September 10, 2015

7 pm – 9 pm at the Berkeley Unitarian Church

(Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists)

Connie Barbour Room, 1606 Bonita in Berkeley

(at Cedar and Bonita, between MLK, Jr and Shattuck)

Please
join us for our next planning meeting aimed to coordinate a mass march
and rally in Oakland from the Lake Merritt Amphitheater to Oakland City
Hall on November 21st as a lead up to the Paris UN COP21 climate meeting
(Nov 30 – Dec 11). We are a network that has grown and expanded from
the groups who organized the Northern California People's Climate Rally
in Oakland on September 21, 2014, in solidarity with the People's
Climate March in New York. Our point of unity are on the reverse
side. We need activists to join our committees: outreach,
media/messaging, and logistics. And please reach out to your networks
and invite other groups to this meeting to help build for climate
action.

Contact us at info@norcalclimatemob.net and visit our website: www.norcalclimatemob.net

*COP21
is the 21st "Conference of the Parties" held by the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change. The conference objective is to
achieve a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, from all
the nations of the world.

Industrial
countries and polluting corporations of the global north need to pay
their ecological debt to society and to the global south by providing
funding for developing countries and vulnerable communities worldwide to
adapt to the impacts of climate change and convert to sustainable
economies.

● A world with an economy that works for people and the planet

Billions
of dollars for energy efficiency and conservation. We need a just
transition to a sustainable, demilitarized economy based on renewable
energy, clean transportation, and jobs for all at union wages. Convert
water-wasting, polluting factory farms to sustainable organic
agriculture. End corporate personhood; end "money equals free speech";
end billionaire purchase of elections.

● A demilitarized
world with peace and social justice for everyone; where Black Lives
Matter; where good jobs, clean air and water, and healthy communities
belong to all

End all forms of oppression and discrimination. No
to environmental racism and pollution of indigenous, low income, and
frontline nations and communities. Respect all indigenous lands. No
militarized police. No wars. No nuclear weapons or power. A true
ecological approach must integrate questions of justice to protect
biodiversity, honor all life on earth and lift all people out of
poverty.

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Starting
this September, Rising Tide North America is calling for mass actions
to shut down the economic and political systems threatening our
survival.

Already, hundreds of thousands are streaming
into the streets to fight back against climate chaos, capitalism and
white supremacy.

This wave of resistance couldn't be
more urgent. To stop climate chaos we need a phenomenal escalation in
organizing, participation and tactical courage. We need a profound
social transformation to uproot the institutions of capitalism,
colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, the systems that created
the climate crisis. And we need to link arms with allies fighting for
migrant justice, dignified work and pay, and an end to the
criminalization and brutal policing of black and brown bodies.

We need to #FloodTheSystem.

In
the lead up to the United Nations climate talks in Paris, in December,
we will escalate local and regional resistance against systems that
threaten our collective survival. Together, we will open alternative
paths to the failing negotiations of political elites.

This
is not another protest. It is a call for a massive economic and
political intervention. It is a call to build the relationships needed
to sustain our struggles for the long haul. To build popular power along
the intersections of race, class, gender and ability. To collectively
unleash our power and change everything.

The Story So Far

Over the past year, hundreds of thousands of people have flowed into the streets to fight back.

Fast
food workers in over a hundred cities went on strike, with thousands
arrested demanding $15 an hour and a union. Young people in Ferguson,
protesting the murder of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson, showed us the
power of sustained action as they fought back against state violence for
weeks, reinvigorating a national movement for Black liberation.
Hundreds of thousands of climate activists marched at the People's
Climate March in New York, and the next day Flood Wall Street shut down
the heart of New York's financial district.

Across the
country, and the world, powerful movements are using nonviolent direct
action to to disrupt business as usual and demand lasting systemic
change.

These moments show that broad mobilization and
disruption are ways that we can transform our society. It is time we
move beyond conventional strategies. Its time we connect across
movements and #FloodTheSystem.

Rising Tide North
America and its allies call on communities, networks, affinity groups
and organizations across the continent to join together this Fall to
rapidly escalate the pace and scale of the anti-capitalist climate
justice movements.

We need to wash away the root causes
of climate change -- capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy and
colonialism. These systems enable the domination of people and Earth.
They place gains for the elite before the well being of our communities.

To
build the scale of movements necessary to take on this challenge, we
need everyone. Using sustained, coordinated direct action we can bring
more people into a movement for radical social transformation than ever
before.

The upcoming United Nations meeting of the
Conference of the Parties in Paris (COP 21) at the end of the year
provide us with an opportunity. Framed as climate negotiations they are
really about capitalism and the corporate elites. We have an opportunity
to focus the debate on capitalism itself as negotiators wedded to and
benefiting from the status quo refuse to discuss the systems that drive
the crisis. This is a natural moment to preemptively highlight community
resistance and radical alternatives in advance of another colossal
failure of international leadership. Through our combined action we can
turn the failure of these critical talks into a moment in which the
systemic nature of the crisis moves to the center and in which our
movements begin to connect and collaborate.

In the
past, the climate movement has repeatedly tried days of action and
one-day marches. While these have built important relationships, they
have not created the sustained movement swells we need. To lay the
groundwork for exponential movement growth we are asking groups to
convene Action Councils, like those forming in the Pacific Northwest,
California, Montana, Northeast and elsewhere, with the intention of
coming together to organize sustained actions beginning in late Summer,
continuing through November and beyond.

With luck,
waves of mobilizations breaking across the continent and world will
build off each other to create a flood of resistance to fossil fuel
extraction, capitalism and colonialism.

Vision

#FloodTheSystem
invites the Rising Tide network, the larger climate justice movements,
and other non-climate focused groups to create a flood of massive
economic and political disruption of the systems that allow the climate
and economic crisis to continue to escalate. This is not a simple call to action or day of action, it's a long-term process. We want to organize a series of actions that would:

Build
a more robust anti-capitalist movement that clearly defines climate
change as a symptom of capitalism. Specifically, we hope to support and
catalyze regional organizing networks and relationships to challenge
extreme energy infrastructure and the systems of oppression that enable
it.

Build long term local, regional and continental networks
that can continue to coordinate, build connections between movements,
and escalate these fights in 2016 and beyond.

Begin to work
closely with other movements through the analysis of where our struggles
intersect and through a commitment to anti-oppressive organizing
practices.

Share, implement and gain experience in innovative
models of horizontal movement structures and mass democracy in
organizing that will serve radical forces for the long haul.

Create
a flood of energy within regions that inspires others to join in with
organic, spontaneous actions and organizing. Regional blocks of
escalating action are already planned that will lead into, and play off,
each other. More emerge everyday.

Preemptively highlight
community resistance and real alternatives to the fossil fuel economy
ahead of the inevitable colossal failure by global elites at the United
Nations climate negotiations in Paris.

Principles

#FloodTheSystem will organize and act according to the following principles.

Anti-capitalism/colonialism/racism/patriarchy
- We see the climate crisis as a symptom of hierarchical social systems
based upon domination and exploitation of lands, and predominately
people of color. Addressing the crisis at its roots means joining with
and supporting those who are fighting for liberation from these and
other oppressive systems, and for their replacement with relations based
upon equity, mutual aid, and ecological stewardship.

Grassroots
Led, NGOs in Support Role - Non-profits and NGOs often function to
co-opt and defuse resistance into reform-based avenues which are
amenable to the social systems we are ultimately seeking to dismantle
and replace. The priorities of this mobilization should be driven by
groups grounded in and accountable to the communities most impacted by
white supremacy, capitalism, and settler colonialism, with NGOs in a
support role -- not the other way around.

Community-Based
Alternatives - Corporations, nation-states, and multilateral
institutions like the United Nations are integral pillars upholding
global capitalism and colonialism. We see alternatives to extreme energy
and the climate crisis arising out of social struggles which challenge
and seek to replace these institutions and their logics. However, we
recognize that there may be important defensive struggles within the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change, such as fighting the expansion
of carbon markets or advancing state recognition of Indigenous land
rights.

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Commute Kevin Cooper's Death Sentence

Sign the Petition:https://act.amnestyusa.org/ea-action/action?ea.client.id=1839&ea.campaign.id=40574&ea.tracking.id=Country_USA~MessagingCategory_DeathPenalty~MessagingCategory_PrisonersandPeopleatRisk&ac=W1507EADP1&ea.url.id=432762&forwarded=true

Urge
Gov. Jerry Brown to commute Kevin Cooper's death sentence. Cooper has
always maintained his innocence of the 1983 quadruple murder of which he
was convicted. In 2009, five federal judges signed a dissenting opinion
warning that the State of California "may be about to execute an
innocent man." Having exhausted his appeals in the US courts, Kevin
Cooper's lawyers have turned to the Inter American Commission on Human
Rights to seek remedy for what they maintain is his wrongful conviction,
and the inadequate trial representation, prosecutorial misconduct and
racial discrimination which have marked the case. Amnesty International
opposes all executions, unconditionally.

"The
State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." - Judge
William A. Fletcher, 2009 dissenting opinion on Kevin Cooper's case

Kevin Cooper has been on death row in California for more than thirty years.

In
1985, Cooper was convicted of the murder of a family and their house
guest in Chino Hills. Sentenced to death, Cooper's trial took place in
an atmosphere of racial hatred — for example, an effigy of a monkey in a
noose with a sign reading "Hang the N*****!" was hung outside the venue
of his preliminary hearing.

Take action to see that Kevin Cooper's death sentence is commuted immediately.

Cooper has consistently maintained his innocence.

Following
his trial, five federal judges said: "There is no way to say this
politely. The district court failed to provide Cooper a fair hearing."

Since 2004, a dozen federal appellate judges have indicated their doubts about his guilt.

Tell California authorities: The death penalty carries the risk of irrevocable error. Kevin Cooper's sentence must be commuted.

In
2009, Cooper came just eight hours shy of being executed for a crime
that he may not have committed. Stand with me today in reminding the
state of California that the death penalty is irreversible — Kevin
Cooper's sentence must be commuted immediately.

Kevin
Cooper's case will be the subject of a new episode of CNN's "Death Row
Stories" airing on Sunday, July 26 at 7 p.m. PDT. The program will be
repeated at 10 p.m. PDT. The episode, created by executive producers
Robert Redford and Alex Gibney, will explore how Kevin Cooper was framed
by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department and District
Attorney.Viewers on the east coast can see the program at 10 p.m. EDT
and it will be rebroadcast at 1 a.m. EDT on July 27. Viewers in the
Central Time zone can see it at 9 p.m. and midnight CDT. Viewers in the
Mountain Time zone can see it at 8 p.m. and ll p.m MDT. It will be aired
on CNN again during the following week and will also be able to be
viewed on CNN's "Death Row Stories" website.

Kevin Cooper: An Innocent Victim of Racist Frame-Up- from the Fact Sheet at: www.freekevincooper.org
Kevin
Cooper is an African-American man who was wrongly convicted and
sentenced to death in 1985 for the gruesome murders of a white family in
Chino Hills, California: Doug and Peggy Ryen and their daughter Jessica
and their house- guest Christopher Hughes. The Ryens' 8 year old son
Josh, also attacked, was left for dead but survived.

Convicted
in an atmosphere of racial hatred in San Bernardino County CA, Kevin
Cooper remains under a threat of imminent execution in San Quentin. He
has never received a fair hearing on his claim of innocence. In a
dissenting opinion in 2009, five federal judges of the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals signed a 82 page dissenting opinion that begins: "The
State of California may be about to execute an innocent man." 565 F.3d
581.

There is significant evidence that exonerates Mr. Cooper and points toward other suspects:


The coroner who investigated the Ryen murders concluded that the
murders took four minutes at most and that the murder weapons were a
hatchet, a long knife, an ice pick and perhaps a second knife. How could
a single person, in four or fewer minutes, wield three or four weapons,
and inflict over 140 wounds on five people, two of whom were adults
(including a 200 pound ex-marine) who had loaded weapons near their
bedsides?

 The sole surviving victim of the murders,
Josh Ryen, told police and hospital staff within hours of the murders
that the culprits were "three white men." Josh Ryen repeated this
statement in the days following the crimes. When he twice saw Mr.
Cooper's picture on TV as the suspected attacker, Josh Ryen said "that's
not the man who did it."

 Josh Ryen's description of
the killers was corroborated by two witnesses who were driving near the
Ryens' home the night of the murders. They reported seeing three white
men in a station wagon matching the description of the Ryens' car
speeding away from the direction of the Ryens' home.


These descriptions were corroborated by testimony of several employees
and patrons of a bar close to the Ryens' home, who saw three white men
enter the bar around midnight the night of the murders, two of whom were
covered in blood, and one of whom was wearing coveralls.


The identity of the real killers was further corroborated by a woman
who, shortly after the murders were discovered, alerted the sheriff's
department that her boyfriend, a convicted murderer, left
blood-spattered coveralls at her home the night of the murders. She also
reported that her boyfriend had been wearing a tan t-shirt matching a
tan t-shirt with Doug Ryen's blood on it recovered near the bar. She
also reported that her boyfriend owned a hatchet matching the one
recovered near the scene of the crime, which she noted was missing in
the days following the murders; it never reappeared; further, her sister
saw that boyfriend and two other white men in a vehicle that could have
been the Ryens' car on the night of the murders.

Lacking
a motive to ascribe to Mr. Cooper for the crimes, the prosecution
claimed that Mr. Cooper, who had earlier walked away from custody at a
minimum security prison, stole the Ryens' car to escape to Mexico. But
the Ryens had left the keys in both their cars (which were parked in the
driveway), so there was no need to kill them to steal their car. The
prosecution also claimed that Mr. Cooper needed money, but money and
credit cards were found untouched and in plain sight at the murder
scene.

The jury in 1985 deliberated for seven days
before finding Mr. Cooper guilty. One juror later said that if there had
been one less piece of evidence, the jury would not have voted to
convict.

The evidence the prosecution presented at
trial tying Mr. Cooper to the crime scene has all been
discredited… (Continue reading this document at:
http://www.savekevincooper.org/_new_freekevincooperdotorg/TEST/Scripts/DataLibraries/upload/KC_FactSheet_2014.pdf)

This message from the Labor Action Committee To Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. July 2015

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Free Albert Woodfox!

On
June 8, 2015 a federal judge granted Louisiana prisoner Albert Woodfox
unconditional release. Albert's conviction had already been overturned
three times - most recently in 2013 - yet every time the state has
appealed.

Today, Albert is still behind
bars after spending four decades in cruel, unjust solitary confinement.
He believes that he and fellow prisoners, Herman Wallace and Robert
King, were first placed in solitary confinement in retaliation for their
activism. All three men were members of the Black Panther Party.
Together, they came to be known as the Angola 3.

It is
time for the State of Louisiana to stop standing in the way of justice.
Call on Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal to ensure Albert's cruel and
unjust confinement is not his legacy. Learn more

Amnesty for all those arrested demanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Amnesty for ALL those arresteddemanding justice for Freddie Gray!

Sign and distribute the petition to drop the charges!Spread this effort with #Amnesty4Baltimore

"A riot is the language of the unheard" — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

An
estimated 300 people have been arrested in Baltimore in the last two
weeks. Many have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in
the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested
include journalists, medics and legal observers.

One
individual arrested for property destruction of a police vehicle is now
facing life in prison and is being held on $500,000 bail. That's
$150,000 more than the officer charged with the murder of Freddie Gray.

The
legal system has made it clear that they care more about broken windows
than broken necks; more about a CVS than the lives of Baltimore's Black
residents.

They showed no hesitation in arresting Baltimore's
protesters and rebels, and sending in the National Guard, but took 19
days to put a single one of the killer cops in handcuffs. This was the
outrageous double standard that led to the Baltimore Uprising.

I
stand in solidarity with those in Baltimore who are demanding that all
charges be dropped against those who rose up against racism, police
brutality, oppressive social conditions and delay of justice in the case
of Freddie Gray. The whole world now recognizes that were it not for
this powerful grassroots movement, in all its forms, there would be no
indictment.

It is an outrage that peaceful
protesters have been brutalized, beaten and pepper-sprayed by police in
the streets, and held for days in inhumane conditions. Those arrested
include journalists and legal observers.

Even the youth
who are charged with property destruction and looting should be given
an amnesty. There is no reason a teenager -- provoked by racists and
justifiably angry -- should be facing life in prison for breaking the
windows of a police car.

The City of Baltimore should
work to rectify the conditions that led to this Uprising, rather than
criminalizing those who took action in response to those conditions.
Drop the charges now!

Sincerely,
[add your name below]

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CANCEL ALL STUDENT DEBT!

Sign the Petition:

http://cancelallstudentdebt.com/?code=kos

Dear President Obama, Senators, and Members of Congress:

Americans
now owe $1.3 trillion in student debt. Eighty-six percent of that money
is owed to the United States government. This is a crushing burden for
more than 40 million Americans and their families.

I urge you to take immediate action to forgive all student debt, public and private.

Action Alert!

Stand with Major Tillery

Dear Bonnie,

Listen to Mumia tell this story. Major
Tillery stood up to the prison administration: he confronted them in no
uncertain terms, noting that Mumia must get to the hospital in
time- before he dies. SCI Mahanory Superintendent Kerestes told Major to mind his own business, to which Major replied 'Mumia is my business'.

Please join us in standing in solidarity with Major Tillery, who has been transferred and put in solitary confinement as punishment for demanding that Mumia receive medical care.

"Major
is in the hole, not because of drugs, but because of something prison
administrators hate and fear among all things: prisoner unity, prisoner
solidarity."

- Mumia Abu-Jamal

1. Call prison officials to demand that Major Tillery be released from solitary confinement!

Superintendent Brenda Tritt, SCI Frackville(570) 874-4516

Dept. Of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel
(717) 728-4109

State that you are calling about Major Tillery #AM9786, to demand he be released from the RHU and placed back in general population.

Inform them that you aware that he is in the hole and being denied medication in retaliation for speaking up for another prisoner.

2. Write Major a letter of solidarity:

Dear Major Tillery,

We
honor your brave act of solidarity on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal. You
urged him to seek medical care and challenged the Prison Superintendent
to protect his life. You helped save the life of a fellow prisoner and
for that act of solidarity they are trying to bury you in the bowels of
SCI Frackville under false charges. No matter how hard they try they
cannot hide you under the weight of lies and intimidation. The power of
the truth must come to light. Thank you Major Tillery for your
courageous service. We salute you!

Major George TilleryAM 9786

SCI Frackville, 1111 Altamont Blvd,

Frackville, PA 17931

"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." -Frederick Douglass

Mumia
Abu-Jamal has Hepatitis C-- and the prison is refusing treatment. We
are going back to court to demand critical care, and we can't do it
without you. Will you support Mumia getting immediate treatment by
giving $250, $100 or even $25 today? Every gift and action makes the
difference for Mumia getting the care he needs. Thank you, Noelle.The time to act is now.

Five
months after being rushed to the hospital, new medical tests show that
Mumia has active Hepatitis C. But prison officials are refusing to treat
him for it.

With your help, that changes- today.

Mumia Abu-Jamal remains weak, ill, and in the prison infirmary.

Five
months after being admitted to the hospital with lethal blood sugar
levels and in renal failure, he continues to have a debilitating skin
rashes, open wounds and swelling across his lower extremities. Because
of our relentless demands for medical testing and treatment, we finally
know the likely cause of his severe ailments: Hepatitis C.

But
what is news to us is not news to his jailers. Prison officials have
known that Mumia was Hep. C positive since 2012-- and have done nothing.

Even
now that prison doctors know that Mumia's Hep. C is active -from
testing they performed solely because we demanded it- they are refusing
to provide treatment.

Today, we are going back to court to demand justice for our brother. Mumia's
legal team (Bret Grote of Abolitionist Law Center and Robert Boyle of
New York) is filing an amended lawsuit today, 'Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes',
to include medical neglect and demand immediate treatment.

Meanwhile,
Prison Radio is working tirelessly to make sure Mumia's legal and
medical team have the necessary resources to get Mumia the critical care
he needs.

And we can't do it without you.

We need your help today to ensure that the prison treats Mumia's Hepatitis C now!

The
world came together for Mumia when he fell unconscious five months ago.
Because of our international outcry for justice and the critical steps
we took, Mumia is alive today.

Now, we need your help to get
Mumia a treatment plan. Can you fight for Mumia's right to medical care
by giving $100, $25 or $250 today?Your donation will:File an amended lawsuit 'Abu-Jamal v. Kerestes' to include medical neglectGet Mumia a full Hepatitis C work up and treatment planGrant Mumia's consulting physicians access to directly examine Mumia Fuel a public campaign to bring Mumia back to healthSupport the demand for treatment of Hepatitis C for all Pennsylvania prisonersPlease join us in demanding immediate medical treatment by giving $25, $100 or even $1,000 now. Every gift and action matters.

Mumia
Abu-Jamal was recently sent back to prison after having been
hospitalized for the second time. There are some reports that his health
is improving. He said to Suzanne Ross of the International Concerned
Friends and Family of Mumia Abu-Jamal that "if there had not been an
international outcry about the lack of appropriate treatment, in fact
AGAINST the 'treatment' that was bringing him so close to death, he was
sure he would not be alive today".

In some good news, he was also told by the prison doctor that his biopsy results came back negative.

However,
neither Mumia nor his wife, lawyers or consulting doctors have been
seen the actual medical reports detailing his condition. The Department
of Corrections refuses to hand over his medical records, claiming that
they don't have to hand them over because there is litigation to have
them released! Denying Mumia and his family his medical records is an
outrage!

We would like to inform you about some recent actions taken by unions around the world on behalf of Mumia.

- Unite,
the largest union in the UK, representing over 1.4 million members,
wrote letters to Governor Tom Wolf, Department of Corrections Secretary
John Wetzel and Legal Counsel Theron Perez protesting Mumia's treatment.

- The International Dockworkers Council,
representing 90,000 dockworkers from affiliated unions around the
world, wrote an appeal to the labor movement calling for action on
behalf of Mumia.

- The Inlandboatmen's Union of the Pacificsent a protest letter to Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel.

We
hope that you will continue to take action on behalf of Mumia. Please
call and email Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel and
demand the following:

1) Mumia Abu-Jamal is an innocent man! He should be freed immediatel

2) Confirm what Mumia's medical condition is. Release his medical records to his family and lawyers!

3)
Allow Mumia to be given medical treatment from a doctor of his choice.
His doctor should be allowed to conduct an on-site medical examination,
to communicate by phone with Mumia, and to communicate freely with
prison medical staff.

We
are also attaching a sample union resolution for you to use as a
template. Please consider submitting it to your union and asking them to
take action on behalf of Mumia. We would also be happy to work with you
and make a presentation to your union or community group about his
condition.

The Labor Action Committee to Free Mumia Abu-Jam

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Campaign to Free Lorenzo Johnson
Updates from the New "Team Free Lorenzo Johnson":
Thank
you all for your relentless effort in the fight against wrongful
convictions and your determination to stand behind Lorenzo.

To
garner even more support for Lorenzo Johnson, we have been hard at work
updating the website and developing an even more formidable and
dedicated team. Please take a moment to visit the new site here.

During
the month of July, Lorenzo wrote two new articles for The Huffington
Post titled "When Prosecutors Deny Justice for the Innocent," and "Hurry
Up and Wait for Justice: The Struggle of Innocent Prisoners." In these
articles, Lorenzo discusses the flaws in the criminal justice system,
which he deems is a "serious problem in this country."

Lastly, Lorenzo has a message to you all.

A Letter from Lorenzo:

July 23, 2015
Dauphin County Prison
Harrisburg, PA

Dear Supporters,

I
hope all is well with everyone and your families. As for myself, I'm
still on my journey in pursuit of my vindication. Sorry for my website
being shut down for a couple of weeks. It was being transferred to a new
provider and management. I'm back and will do my best to keep
everything up to speed with what's taking place.

I
would like to thank ALL of my loyal supporters in the U.S. and in the
MANY different counties that have signed on to support my innocence.
Thanks for all of the letters, emails, photos, etc. Like I always say, I
get energy to carry on and inspiration hearing form you, please stay
engaged in my struggle.

As of this moment, nothing has
changed, but – the continued delay tactics are constantly being used by
my prosecutor, Deputy Attorney General William Stoycos. With the
mounting of evidence that supports my innocence and police and
prosecution misconduct claims that is steadily piling up, you would
think that I would be having a couple of evidentiary hearings on my
actual innocence appeal that have been pending since August 5, 2013.

At
the time of this writing, I've been moved from SCI-Mahanoy to Dauphin
County Prison and locked down for 23 hours and 40 minutes a day. In the
20 minutes I get to come out, I get to take a shower and make a short
call. Prosecutor Stoycos had me moved so I can be a witness in his
attempt to have my codefendant Corey Walker's attorney removed from
representing him. How dare he call into question an attorney who is
seeking justice for her client, when prosecutor Stoycos himself violated
multiple constitutional rights of mine and Mr. Walker, that led to us
being in prison for 20 years and counting.

Prosecutor
Stoycos is continuously abusing his power and his endless resources he
has at his disposal. He is not tough on crime, he's tough on Innocent
Prisoners. Prosecutor Stoycos is doing everything in his power to
prevent justice from taking place. I encourage everyone to continue to
speak out against my nightmare, invite others to get involved by going
to my website and signing my Freedom Petition and whatever else they're
willing to do.

On a positive note, I just enrolled in
warehouse management trade and started on July 13th. Unfortunately,
you're only allowed to miss a couple of days and Prosecutor Stoycos had
me temporarily transferred on July 14th … It's extremely hard on Lifers
to get into these trades due to the fact that Lifers are placed at the
back of the list of ALL vocational classes. I try to further my
education every chance I get, so when I do come home, I will be
certified in different work.

The month of the hearing
has come and left, without me being brought to the courthouse … I'm one
of MANY innocent prisoners who endures this non-stop madness in our
pursuit of Justice and Freedom. Now that my webpage is almost caught up
to speed, I promise prompt updates and as everyone knows that contacted
me directly, I personally reply to those in the states and out of the
country. For those who can make a financial contribution, everything
counts. Take care and let's continue to fight until we achieve Freedom,
Justice, and Equality for all innocent prisoners.

"The Pain Within"

Free the Innocent
Lorenzo "Cat" Johnson

[Note: Lorenzo has since been transferred back to SCI Mahanoy and can be reached at his usual address.]

Thank
you all for reading this message and please take the time to visit the
new website and contribute to Lorenzo's campaign for freedom!

On
December 15, 2014 the Rev. Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan
was thrown into prison for 2.5 to 10 years. This 66-year-old leading
African American activist was tried and convicted in front of an
all-white jury and racist white judge and prosecutor for supposedly
altering 5 dates on a recall petition against the mayor of Benton
Harbor.

The prosecutor, with the judge's approval,
repeatedly told the jury "you don't need evidence to convict Mr.
Pinkney." And ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE WAS EVER PRESENTED THAT TIED REV.
PINKNEY TO THE 'ALTERED' PETITIONS. Rev. Pinkney was immediately led
away in handcuffs and thrown into Jackson Prison.

This is an outrageous charge. It is an outrageous conviction. It is an even more outrageous sentence! It must be appealed.

With your help supporters need to raise $20,000 for Rev. Pinkney's appeal.

Checks
can be made out to BANCO (Black Autonomy Network Community
Organization). This is the organization founded by Rev. Pinkney. Mail
them to: Mrs. Dorothy Pinkney, 1940 Union Street, Benton Harbor, MI
49022.

Donations can be accepted on-line at bhbanco.org – press the donate button.

For information on the decade long campaign to destroy Rev. Pinkney go to bhbanco.org and workers.org(search "Pinkney").

I
am now in Marquette prison over 15 hours from wife and family, sitting
in prison for a crime that was never committed. Judge Schrock and Mike
Sepic both admitted there was no evidence against me but now I sit in
prison facing 30 months. Schrock actually stated that he wanted to make
an example out of me. (to scare Benton Harbor residents even more...)
ONLY IN AMERICA. I now have an army to help fight Berrien County. When I
arrived at Jackson state prison on Dec. 15, I met several hundred
people from Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. Some people
recognized me. There was an outstanding amount of support given by the
prison inmates. When I was transported to Marquette Prison it took 2
days. The prisoners knew who I was. One of the guards looked me up on
the internet and said, "who would believe Berrien County is this
racist."

Background to Campaign to free Rev. Pinkney

Michigan
political prisoner the Rev. Edward Pinkney is a victim of racist
injustice. He was sentenced to 30 months to 10 years for supposedly
changing the dates on 5 signatures on a petition to recall Benton Harbor
Mayor James Hightower.

No material or circumstantial
evidence was presented at the trial that would implicate Pinkney in the
purported5 felonies. Many believe that Pinkney, a Berrien County
activist and leader of the Black Autonomy Network Community Organization
(BANCO), is being punished by local authorities for opposing the
corporate plans of Whirlpool Corp, headquartered in Benton Harbor,
Michigan.

In 2012, Pinkney and BANCO led an "Occupy the
PGA [Professional Golfers' Association of America]" demonstration
against a world-renowned golf tournament held at the newly created Jack
Nicklaus Signature Golf Course on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. The
course was carved out of Jean Klock Park, which had been donated to the
city of Benton Harbor decades ago.

Berrien County
officials were determined to defeat the recall campaign against Mayor
Hightower, who opposed a program that would have taxed local
corporations in order to create jobs and improve conditions in Benton
Harbor, a majority African-American municipality. Like other Michigan
cities, it has been devastated by widespread poverty and unemployment.

The
Benton Harbor corporate power structure has used similar fraudulent
charges to stop past efforts to recall or vote out of office the racist
white officials, from mayor, judges, prosecutors in a majority Black
city. Rev Pinkney who always quotes scripture, as many Christian
ministers do, was even convicted for quoting scripture in a newspaper
column. This outrageous conviction was overturned on appeal. We must do
this again!

To sign the petition in support of the Rev. Edward Pinkney, log on to: tinyurl.com/ps4lwyn.

New Action--write letters to DoD officials requesting clemency for Chelsea!

Secretary of the Army John McHugh

President Obama has delegated review of Chelsea Manning's clemency appeal to individuals within the Department of Defense.

Please
write them to express your support for heroic WikiLeaks' whistle-blower
former US Army intelligence analyst PFC Chelsea Manning's release from
military prison.

It is important that each of these
authorities realize the wide support that Chelsea (formerly Bradley)
Manning enjoys worldwide. They need to be reminded that millions
understand that Manning is a political prisoner, imprisoned for
following her conscience. While it is highly unlikely that any of these
individuals would independently move to release Manning, a reduction in
Manning's outrageous 35-year prison sentence is a possibility at this
stage.

The
letter should focus on your support for Chelsea Manning, and especially
why you believe justice will be served if Chelsea Manning's sentence is
reduced. The letter should NOT be anti-military as this will be
unlikely to help.

A suggested message: "Chelsea Manning
has been punished enough for violating military regulations in the
course of being true to her conscience. I urge you to use your
authorityto reduce Pvt. Manning's sentence to time served." Beyond that
general message, feel free to personalize the details as to why you
believe Chelsea deserves clemency.

Consider composing
your letter on personalized letterhead -you can create this yourself
(here are templates and some tips for doing that).

A comment on this post will NOT be seen by DoD authorities–please send your letters to the addresses above

This
clemency petition is separate from Chelsea Manning's upcoming appeal
before the US Army Court of Criminal Appeals next year, where Manning's
new attorney Nancy Hollander will have an opportunity to highlight the
prosecution's—and the trial judge's—misconduct during last year's trial
at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

Help us continue to cover 100% of Chelsea's legal fees at this critical stage!

VIENNA
— The partly decomposing bodies of as many as 50 people assumed to be
migrants being smuggled across Europe were found in a truck abandoned on
a highway east of Vienna on Thursday, the police said.

The
precise toll was yet to be determined, said Hans-Peter Doskozil,
director of the police in the eastern state of Burgenland, during a live
news conference on Austria’s public broadcaster.

He
said the bodies, some of which had started to decompose, had been
discovered when the truck was opened after the police noticed it parked
off the highway that links Budapest and Vienna. He declined to give
further details.

Mr. Doskozil said the Austrian police had
contacted the authorities in neighboring Hungary, which has accelerated
the building of a fence along the border with Serbia in an effort to
block the flow of tens of thousands of migrants who have worked their
way up the length of the Balkans in recent weeks.The border fence has
threatened to complicate and even cut off what has become an
increasingly accessible route for the migrants, many of whom are fleeing
wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

In recent interviews,
humanitarian aid workers and the migrants themselves said the fence
would not stop the migrants but would force them to find other ways to
make it to wealthy European Union countries farther north, often with the help of human traffickers.

The
grisly discovery coincided with the start of a conference in Vienna on
how to make the Balkans more secure and prosperous, partly as a means to
stop the flight of thousands seeking better economic conditions in
Austria, Germany and other more wealthy parts of the European Union.

Chancellor
Angela Merkel of Germany, the European Union’s foreign policy chief,
Federica Mogherini, and Balkan heads of government are attending the
conference.

Ms. Merkel and Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria
expressed sorrow over the deaths and said they were a chilling reminder
of the need to give shelter to migrants fleeing war.

“We are all
shaken by this terrible news that up to 50 people have lost their lives
because they got into a situation where smugglers did not care about
their lives,” Ms. Merkel said.

“Such a tragic death,” she added,
emphasized the need for Europe to pull together and ease the current
crisis, part of the biggest wave of migrants since World War II.

In his remarks, Mr. Faymann said, “This shows once more how necessary it is to save lives and to fight people smugglers.”

He
said, “Those who look back to World War II history know that there were
people who depended then on asylum” to survive. Today, too, “it saves
lives,” he added.

Gerald Tatzgern, who leads an Austrian police
team responsible for fighting human trafficking, said that the police
had secured the site where the truck was found. But he said it would
take several days for forensics teams to sift through the evidence and
potentially learn more about the identities of those found dead.

The
police are still searching for anyone who might have information about
the truck, which had Hungarian license plates and was found abandoned in
an emergency area beside a highway in the Neusiedl am See region, near
the Hungarian border.

The Austrian authorities said they were
working with the Hungarian police to try and find the driver, who is
believed to be from Hungary.

Images in the Austrian news media
showed a white vehicle with a rear cooler compartment, emblazoned with
the word “Hyza” in brown letters, with a chicken standing in for the
letter Y, surrounded by police cars parked at the side of the freeway.

A Slovakia-based company by the name of Hyza
told the Austrian news agency APA that it had sold more than a dozen of
its vehicles in 2014 but that it had no further knowledge about them.

Austria’s
interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, called it a “dark day” and
urged everyone across the 28-nation European Union to move harshly
against human traffickers.

“These are not well-minded helpers,”
she said. “They are not concerned with the welfare of the migrants. They
care only about profit.”

The discovery of the truck not only
threatened to overshadow the conference but also highlighted the
continuing divides and dysfunction of the European Union in handling a
migration crisis that is straining resources.

Ms. Mogherini gave
the strongest voice to Europe’s need to act to stop such deaths, “moving
from the blame game to real cooperation.”

There is “no magic solution,” she said, “but the road we can follow to start making things work is very well known.”

“We
understand very well that we cannot continue like this — with a moment
of silence every time we see someone dying,” she said.

Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin.

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2) San Francisco Firefighters Become Unintended Safety Net for the Homeless

SAN
FRANCISCO — When the emergency bell sounds at Fire Station 1 here,
firefighters pull on boots and backpacks, swing into Engine 1 and hurtle
out the door in almost a single motion, a blast of red lights and
caterwauling sirens. More often than not, there is no fire.

Instead,
the calls that ring in this and nearby fire stations tend to go like
this: Male, apparently homeless, sprawled unconscious on a train
platform. Male, prone on a street corner pushing a needle into his arm.

In
a measure of just how much homelessness has become an all-encompassing
problem here, this city has the busiest fire engine in America — yet
just over 1.5 percent of its runs last year involved fires.“We are here
to help anybody — we have this infrastructure, and it’s always been here
to help the city and its people,” said Lt. Tom Johannessen, an officer
on the crew for Engine 1, which is based in the South of Market Street
neighborhood and includes in its catchment the gritty Tenderloin
neighborhood. “We are your best point for help, where it helps people in
a car crash or a medical call. But where it gets to be picking up the
same homeless person twice a day, it gets to be strained.”

In San
Francisco and other cities, as homeless populations swell and emergency
services are pushed to the limit, the question of how to provide
housing for the growing ranks of street people — or whether to even
bother trying — is a contentious debate. Mayor Ed Lee said this week
that the homeless are “going to have to leave” the streets before the
Super Bowl comes to town in February, but it is not entirely clear how
that is going to happen.

A result is that the job of caring for
the homeless has fallen heavily on the shoulders of firefighters and
police officers, whose training is not necessarily in this area and
whose challenge in confronting the problem is constantly on display.

In the age of ubiquitous camera phones, images of their struggles can go viral. Last week, a video surfaced
online of a disabled black man on a busy street in San Francisco being
restrained by officers who knelt on his prosthetic leg. Many onlookers
saw not the police grappling with a mentally disturbed man as he kicked
and bit, but yet another incident of police brutality.

The man was eventually taken to a hospital by firefighters, and was not arrested.

Last
year, Engine 1 held the dubious honor of being the busiest engine in
the entire country, according to a nationwide survey by Firehouse
Magazine. In 2014, it made 10,221 runs, far outpacing the second-place
engine (Engine 33 in Los Angeles, with 8,880 runs) and any single engine
in New York City (where the busiest was Engine 290 in Brooklyn, with
6,101 runs). The year before, San Francisco’s Engine 3 — based in the Tenderloin — had the highest number of runs.

To
be sure, some individual fire stations, which can house multiple
engines, made more runs than either Engine 1 or Engine 3 in San
Francisco. And larger cities — like New York, with its roughly 8.4
million residents — handled a much higher total of calls than San Francisco, which has about 850,000 residents.

But
with an estimated 6,700 homeless people, San Francisco has a slightly
higher proportion than New York, which has about 58,000 homeless people.
Firefighters here say that calls involving homeless people dominate
their shifts.

“For somebody whose dream was going to be a
firefighter, their dream was they are going to be rushing into burning
buildings, and they get into it, and they’re like, ‘What do you mean I
only put out a fire once a month?’ “ said Capt. Niels Tangherlini, a
veteran paramedic.

With a budget of more than $330 million, the
San Francisco Fire Department responded to more than 136,000 incidents
last year — about 28,000 of them fires and other nonmedical calls for
service, plus just under 12,000 false alarms.

Equally vexing,
firefighters say, is that the same few homeless people — the “frequent
fliers,” as they call them — account for an extraordinary number of
calls.

“You’re going to roll out of a station 20 times a day to
go see the same chronic inebriate, the same mentally ill guy,” Captain
Tangherlini said. “And it breaks a lot of their spirit.”

On a
patrol in mid-August, Captain Tangherlini greeted one such homeless man
as he lay in the city’s sobering center on Mission Street. Established
in 2003, it is a barracks where emergency crews take severely inebriated
people as an alternative to an emergency room. The man was familiar,
Captain Tangherlini said, because in the past few years firefighters had
been summoned to his aid between 300 and 500 times.

Advances in
fire-safe construction, among other things, have contributed to a
national shift in fire departments away from fighting infernos and
toward responding to medical emergencies. “We are the absolute last,
bottom rung of the social safety net, when every other institution
fails,” said Thomas P. O’Connor, the president of the San Francisco Firefighters union.

Gordon
Allen, 57, who lives on the street, said the situation made sense.
“Hey, I’m out here on the street, and things happen real quick,” Mr.
Allen said as he sat on his usual egg crate in the Mission District last
week. “And thank God we have the Fire Department to back us up when
things go downhill.”

Engine 1 can receive 30 calls on an ordinary
day, members of the crew said, but often an entire shift goes by
without a single fire. Each call involves sirens and a vehicle with 500
gallons of water in its belly, a supply that usually goes untapped.

“It
kind of feels like you’re a Band-Aid, that this person has problems
that are so much deeper than we’re able to fix,” said Capt. Dean Crispen
of Truck 1. ”You realize your job is to solve the immediate crisis at
hand. Bigger problems, they are out of your scope.”

Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness,
a nonprofit in the city, said a lack of reasonably priced housing was
the biggest problem. “All of those calls and costs would be avoided if
they provided people with somewhere safe and decent to live,” she said.
“Instead, we are letting human beings’ health deteriorate so they need
to be picked up that frequently.”

Christine Falvey, a spokeswoman
for the mayor’s office, said that a new budget, passed on July 1, that
increased the amount spent on homeless services to nearly $230 million,
would help ease the problem: By the end of this year 500 new
single-occupancy units will be built and existing homeless resources
will be expanded.

Dr. Clement Yeh, the San Francisco Fire
Department’s medical director, said the city was in the early stages of
re-establishing a program that paired social service workers with
ambulance crews; it was disbanded in 2009.

“We are looking to
evolve in ways other than sending an engine and a truck and taking you
to an emergency room,” Dr. Yeh said. “For a certain population that we
are seeing quite a bit of, that isn’t actually helping.”

WASHINGTON — Planned Parenthood
on Thursday gave congressional leaders and a committee that is
investigating allegations of criminality at its clinics an analysis it
commissioned concluding that “manipulation” of undercover videos by
abortion opponents make those recordings unreliable for any official
inquiry.

“A thorough review of these videos in consultation with
qualified experts found that they do not present a complete or accurate
record of the events they purport to depict,” said the analysis of a
private research company.

Cecile Richards, the president of
Planned Parenthood, underscored that message in a cover letter to the
Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and House Speaker John A.
Boehner, both Republicans, and to Senator Harry Reid and Representative
Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders.

With Mr. Boehner’s urging, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee in July opened an investigation of Planned Parenthood after the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group, began posting online secretly recorded videos
that the center claims show Planned Parenthood affiliates illegally
profit from selling tissue from aborted fetuses to researchers and, in
some late-term abortions, prevent a possible live birth.

Planned Parenthood denies the charges, and says that the videos were deceptively and misleadingly edited.

The
analysis was by Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research and corporate
intelligence company, and its co-founder Glenn Simpson, a former
investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal.

The videos,
recorded by two activists posing as representatives of a biotechnology
firm procuring tissue for researchers and universities, continue to be
released online about once a week. One of the activists, David Daleiden
of California, told The New York Times last month that his “thousands of hours of videotape”
was enough to release videos into the fall. That will coincide with
Congress’s final budget debate, and the videos have stoked growing
Republican threats of a government shutdown unless Planned Parenthood is
stripped of about $500 million it gets annually, mostly to care for
low-income Medicaid patients. By law, public funds cannot pay for abortions.

The
analysis commissioned by Planned Parenthood cover the first four videos
and transcripts from the Center for Medical Progress, which were
recorded in California, Colorado and Texas. Several have been released
since with footage repeated from earlier videos, though the most recent
ones focus not on Planned Parenthood but on a company, StemExpress, that procures fetal and human tissue globally for research.

The
reviewers looked at both shorter, edited videos that are about eight
minutes to 15 minutes long and what Mr. Daleiden said were full-length
recordings, some more than two hours long, that he released
simultaneously.

A transcription service was hired to transcribe
the videos, without being told that Planned Parenthood was the client,
to compare with transcripts publicized by the anti-abortion group. That
comparison, the analysis said, showed “substantive omissions” from the
group’s version. Mr. Simpson was assisted in the analysis by several
others including a video forensics expert, Grant Fredericks, and a
television producer, Scott Goldie.

According to the
investigation, the reviewers could not determine “the extent to which
C.M.P.s undisclosed edits and cuts distort the meaning of the encounters
the videos purport to document.”

But, it said, “the manipulation
of the videos does mean they have no evidentiary value in a legal
context and cannot be relied upon for any official inquiries” unless
C.M.P. provides investigators with its original material, and that
material is independently authenticated as unaltered.

For
example, Mr. Fredericks said recordings in Houston and Denver were each
missing about 30 minutes of video, judging from time stamps and frame
counters on the recordings.

The analysis also supported Planned
Parenthood’s objection to two allegations that have elicited some of the
most outrage from anti-abortion forces, disputing that Planned
Parenthood staffers at one point say of fetal remains, “It’s a baby,”
and in a second instance, “another boy.”

Each summer, 500,000 wildebeests die along the treacherous migration from the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania to the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. And with death come the scavengers, none more important than the vulture.

But
the birds that once feasted on that misfortune, the janitors that clean
the grassy plains, are collapsing — part of a broader decline in
vulture populations that throws off ecosystems and illustrates how
far-reaching the effects of poaching, poisoning and other human
interventions can be.

“The overall global picture for vultures is
abysmal,” said Darcy Ogada, the assistant director of Africa programs
at the Peregrine Fund, an organization dedicated to saving birds of
prey. “Does this story echo that of the canary in the coal mine? Sure
does.”

In the first major study
of the 30-year decline of Pan-African vultures, Dr. Ogada and other
scientists found that populations of eight species of vultures had
declined an average of 62 percent.

Seven of those species had
declined at a rate of 80 percent or more over three generations,
according to the study, published this summer in the journal
Conservation Letters.

In some parts of Africa, vultures are
targeted by poachers who poison carcasses hoping to kill the birds so
they will not circle overhead and signal park rangers. A vulture can
spot a dead elephant in less than 30 minutes, but it can take a poacher
more than an hour to hack off ivory tusks. No vulture, no warning.

Here
on the Mara, one of the greatest natural strongholds left on the
planet, the vultures are not directly targeted but are the unintended
victims of poisoning of carcasses that is meant to kill large
carnivores, like hyenas, in an effort to protect livestock.

Across
Africa, the threats to wildlife are myriad, but much of the attention
is focused on the stately animals of the savanna, like lions and
elephants.

Vultures do not make for pretty postcards, and the
local authorities are already stretched thin trying to protect the
animals that tourists come to see.

“Everyone forgets about the
Ugly Bettys of this world,” said Munir Z. Virani, who directs the Africa
and South Asia programs for the Peregrine Fund. “We are told all the
time by the authorities that they are so busy working to protect
elephants and rhinos and other animals that when it comes to the
vultures, they are exhausted.”

Anthony Ole Tira, who is Masai and
was raised on these lands and is now the co-owner of the Matira Bush
Camp in the heart of the reserve, stood by a river crossing and pointed
to scores of rotting carcasses.

One week earlier, 900,000
wildebeests, long in the face and often short on luck, had plunged
headlong into the river in a panic. Thousands were trampled to death.

That was normal. The rotting remains were not.

“Ten
years ago, this would have been cleaned by now,” he said. “There are a
lot of places along the Mara River that are not as clean as they once
were because there are not enough vultures.”

Researchers say they have seen what happens to an ecosystem when the vultures disappear.

In 2000, Dr. Virani was dispatched to India, where vultures were dying in great numbers but no one knew why.

“Everywhere I went, there were dead vultures,” he said. “But everywhere, their remains were in good condition.”

The
initial hypothesis was that some type of infectious disease was behind
the deaths. Soon it became clear that the killer was man-made.

A painkiller widely used to treat livestock was poisoning the birds that fed on their carcasses.

One
carcass with the painkiller in its system could poison hundreds of
birds, Dr. Virani said, and by 2006, when the painkiller was officially
banned, the vulture population had already declined by 97 percent.

Over
the same period, there was a drastic rise in cases of rabies in India,
with feral dogs taking advantage of the decline in vultures and often
spreading the disease to humans.

Dr. Virani described what he
called apocalyptic scenes, with hordes of wild dogs numbering in the
thousands, scavenging the remains of livestock. Estimates vary, but some
put the feral dog population in India now as high as 25 million.

Roughly 36 percent of the world’s rabies deaths — the majority of them children — occur in India, according to the World Health Organization. The battle against the virus is costing the government billions of dollars.

Over
tens of millions of years, vultures have evolved into the most
efficient cleaners in the natural world. Because of their highly acidic
gastric juices, they can eat flesh infected with a variety of diseases
without getting ill.

When the vultures feast on diseased meat, picking the carcass clean, the threat of wider infection ends.

But once the vultures are cleared from the skies, they are very hard to bring back.

Within the first four weeks of their lives, 50 percent of newborn vultures that leave the nest will die.

“They are naïve,” Dr. Virani said. Many fall from their nests, while others succumb to natural causes.

In their first year of life, vultures have an extraordinary 90 percent mortality rate.

If they survive, they do not become sexually mature until their fifth year. Even then, their reproductive rate is low.

In
Arizona, California and Utah, the Peregrine Fund and its partners have
been working for years to bring back the critically endangered
California condor, which by 1987 was almost completely wiped out by lead
poisoning, with fewer than two dozen birds left. Nearly three decades
later, there are around 400, fewer than half of them in captivity.

In
Africa, Dr. Virani hopes that the population decline can be halted and
reversed before it reaches the kind of critical situation found in India
and other parts of the world.“It is not too late,” he said.

The
Peregrine Fund has started a program with the Masai people of East
Africa to change attitudes about using poisons. It supported a young
Masai man, Eric Ole-Reson, to study at Clemson University in South
Carolina, and he has since returned to work with other Masai.

There are few things more important to the Masai than their cows. “The movable bank,” Mr. Tira calls them.

When
a cow is killed by a lion or other predator, it is a threat to a
family’s livelihood. So the Masai will poison carcasses in the hope of
killing the killers. Inevitably, vultures come to feed and die.

Ole
Sairowa, 67, a village elder, said that the use of poisons started two
decades ago when the government provided “a dangerous white powder” to
kill feral dogs. A decade later, he started to notice fewer vultures.

“Now we are worried they are not coming back,” he said.

Mr.
Sairowa was recruited by Dr. Virani and the fund’s Kenyan director,
Kabir Dhanji, to play a part in a short educational film about the
unintended dangers of using poison, “Empty Skies,” which will be shown
in villages across the Mara.

Mr. Tira and his son Selian, 9, also appear in the film.

Mr.
Sairowa said that when he was a boy, the Masai would sing songs to the
vulture. The appearance of the bird, long prized for its ability to see
into the future, could be a good or bad omen, depending on the context.
One song asks the vultures to stay away until a cow dies naturally, at
which point they are promised a tasty feast.

Conservationists are
working to find other ways to help the Masai protect their cows,
including the testing of a system of solar-powered flashing lights to
ward off predators at night.

But other threats to birds of prey
remain. Dr. Virani cited the intensive effort to bring electricity to
power-starved communities across Africa through the construction of wind farms and power plants as one that, if not carried out carefully, could endanger vultures and other birds.

For
now, the vultures — which in flight look every bit as majestic as the
beloved eagle — continue to play their role in the natural drama that
unfolds during the migration.

On a recent morning, as first light
broke over fields of red oat grass on the savanna, a female lion let
roar. A male lion returned the call, and the hunt was on.

By the time it was over, five wildebeests had met their end, their carcasses obscured in the tall grass.

It
took only a few minutes for vultures to begin circling overhead. First
two, then a dozen, then scores. They waited until the lions began
walking away before swooping in and perching near the carcass.

Once the vultures pounced, it took them 20 minutes to pick the bones clean.

It seemed efficient. But Mr. Tira said the job used to be accomplished much faster, by many more vultures.

“In
five minutes, they would be done,” he said. “If the vultures continue
to disappear, can you imagine? This whole beautiful place will become
one stink pit.”

LA
CORNEUVE, France — Police cleared out one of France's biggest and
oldest Roma camps on Thursday, dismantling a sprawling network of
makeshift shelters next to a Paris region highway under pouring rain.

The
evacuation of around 200 people lasted around 2 ½ hours and after it
was done, about 50 people milled about on the streets of La Corneuve,
despite the town's promises to give them either urgent housing or hotel
vouchers.

Hugues Besancenot, the secretary general of the
Seine-Saint-Denis region northeast of Paris, said around 60 women,
children and disabled camp residents received urgent housing, while the
rest received hotel vouchers.

"They did nothing for us. They said
there's no place for me," said Brindus Dan, who lived in the camp with
his wife and three children, including a 6-month-old baby.

Residents
had six months to prepare for the evacuation, ever since a court
ordered it shut last February. Police gave a final warning on Tuesday,
Besancenot said.

Thousands of Roma, also known as Gypsies, are
estimated to live in France, and face routine discrimination and
evacuations. Their camps tend to lack water and electricity, and
authorities often cite sanitary reasons for dismantling them.

In
Thursday's action, police initially came through to tell residents to
leave, and bulldozers arrived in mid-afternoon, according to Manon
Fillonneau of the European Roma Rights Group, speaking from the site.
Families quickly grabbed what belongings they could and gathered along a
roadside or beneath the awning of a closed cafe under a steady
rainfall.

Local authorities reserved 12 rooms for residents in
extreme need, such as those who are very sick, she said, calling it not
nearly enough compared to the approximately 300 people being evacuated.

The mayor of La Courneuve wouldn't immediately comment on the evacuation.

Loic
Gandais, whose association works with Roma elsewhere in the Paris
region, said it's one of the largest and longest-lasting camps in
France, housing 200-300 people for at least three years, mostly Roma
from eastern Europe who cycle through.

New clashes erupted Wednesday in western India
as the police and paramilitary forces tried to quell riots led by
members of a farming caste demanding government benefits. At least five
people have been killed by the police or paramilitary units in the past
two days, the police said. The authorities imposed a curfew in part of
Gujarat State on Tuesday night after mobs attacked police officers with
stones and sticks and burned vehicles. The leader of the protesters,
known as the Patidars, called for a general strike to press the group’s
demands for the special status given to many minorities in India,
guaranteeing them a share of government jobs and school places. The
Patidars, many of whom use the surname Patel, make up about 20 percent
of Gujarat’s 63 million people and say their livelihoods based on
farming and small industry have become increasingly difficult to
sustain.

Facing increasing pressure to curb erratic scheduling practices, Gap announced that it would stop requiring employees to make themselves available for last-minute shifts.

The
move makes Gap the latest retailer to move away from “on-call
scheduling,” which regulators, workers’ rights groups and some academics
say is detrimental to employees and their families.

“At
Gap Inc., we also believe that work-life integration enables all
employees to reach their full potential and thrive both personally and
professionally,” the company said in a statement on its blog
announcing the change on Wednesday. “We recognize that flexibility,
inclusive of consistent and reliable scheduling, is important to all of
our employees.”On-call scheduling requires employees to call ahead
before a specific shift to see if they will be needed, a practice that
gives workers little predictability in scheduling. Facing public and
regulatory pressure, some retailers, including Abercrombie & Fitch,
Starbucks and Victoria’s Secret, have already begun phasing out the
practice.

Gap said its five brands — Athleta, Banana Republic,
Gap, Intermix and Old Navy — had agreed to stop on-call scheduling by
the end of next month and have committed to providing employees with at
least 10 to 14 days’ notice, according to Wednesday’s announcement.

In
April, the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, sent a
letter to more than a dozen retailers, including Abercrombie &
Fitch, Gap, J. C. Penney and Victoria’s Secret, requesting more
information about on-call scheduling and questioning whether such
practices were legal. In the months since, Abercrombie & Fitch and
Victoria’s Secret both announced they would discontinue it.

Mr. Schneiderman praised Gap’s decision in a statement on Wednesday.

“Workers
deserve stable and reliable work schedules, and I commend Gap for
taking an important step to make their employees’ schedules fairer and
more predictable,” he said.

Gap had already begun scaling back
the use of on-call shifts after starting a pilot program last year to
test alternative scheduling practices. Mr. Schneiderman’s office told
Gap last week that it would consider legal action if the retailer did
not take steps to end on-call scheduling, according to Eric Soufer, a
spokesman for the attorney general’s office.

A recent study
by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal advocacy group, found that
the children of parents who worked unpredictable schedules could have
inferior cognitive abilities, in areas like verbal communication, and
struggle with anxiety and depression.

Jessica
Otero’s request to the judge, made in neat handwriting, was simple: She
wanted a second chance. Ten years after being convicted of driving an
illegal immigrant across the border, her felony record meant she could
not get work in the medical field. “I have learned from my past mistakes
and am headed down a positive path,” Ms. Otero wrote.

Federal
district courts review dozens of similar requests a month, detailing how
old convictions are affecting defendants’ lives. Most judges have a
standard response: Courts can expunge convictions only in exceptional
circumstances. While Ms. Otero’s two-page letter described fairly common
circumstances, the judge’s response was unusual.

“Her concern is
justified,” Larry Alan Burns, a Federal District Court judge in the
Southern District of California, wrote in June. “The court is inclined
to grant the motion.”

Through everything from protest movements
to bipartisan legislation addressing the high prison population, the
nation is in the midst of a searching examination of the
criminal-justice system, taking up long-simmering criticisms about race,
inequality and law enforcement. While much of the focus has been on the
police and prosecutors’ work, some judges are now taking a more active
role, pushing for a reassessment of how defendants are punished.

“The
popular view in our country has changed — we don’t want to hold
somebody down forever and ever,” Judge Burns said in an interview. “I
think judges should be aware of those things.”

It is hardly a
uniform shift in judges’ attitudes, but across the country, some judges
are refashioning sentences, asking prosecutors to drop cases that judges
see as unfair, considering how to reduce the long-term impact of old
convictions, and writing essays advocating change.

Among the moves: In June, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote five pages denouncing solitary confinement in a Supreme Court case where solitary confinement was not the issue. Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan has written essays recently attacking plea bargaining and mass incarceration. In a June law-review article,
Alex Kozinski, a United States Court of Appeals judge for the Ninth
Circuit, criticized a range of criminal-justice issues, from fingerprint
evidence to prosecutorial discretion to long sentences. These “are some
of the reasons to doubt that our criminal justice system is
fundamentally just,” he wrote. Other judges are putting out their point
of view in decisions in individual cases.

“A growing number of
federal judges, usefully insulated by life tenure, are feeling a need to
speak out,” said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at the Ohio State
University Moritz College of Law. “Judges are moved by the broader
public conversation about the need for reforms, and certain ones say,
‘That broader conversation ought to be reflected in the work I do, not
just in the work that the political branch does.’ ”

In June,
three judges for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh
Circuit reviewed an Indiana case in which an Italian-born man who had
never become a citizen said he did not realize that a guilty plea in his
marijuana-growing case would result in deportation. He asked to
withdraw the plea. A district court judge denied the motion, but the
Court of Appeals reversed that decision.

Prosecutors argued that
the man, Renato DeBartolo, could face a much more severe sentence at
trial, thus his push to withdraw the plea was irrational. Judge Richard
A. Posner, writing the Seventh Circuit panel’s unanimous opinion,
disagreed, citing the changing public opinion on drugs.

“In light
of the growing movement to legalize the sale of marijuana,” Judge
Posner wrote, “a jury might have thought his offense trivial and either
acquitted him or convicted him of some lesser offense.”

The judge
then asked the government to reconsider even pursuing the case: “The
government should consider whether having served the prison sentence the
government originally recommended and having then languished in the
custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service for a year or more
and then deported to a country in which he has never really lived,
DeBartolo has been punished sufficiently and should now be allowed to go
home to his wife and children without facing a new trial.” Legal
proceedings in his case continue.

Mark W. Bennett, a Federal
District Court judge in the Northern District of Iowa, also pushed
prosecutors, writing in an opinion in which he described prosecutors’
“stunningly arbitrary” decision-making over whether to file information
about a drug defendant’s prior convictions, which increases their sentences.

“These
decisions are shrouded in such complete secrecy that they make the
proceedings of the former English Court of Star Chamber appear to be a
model of criminal justice transparency,” Judge Bennett wrote in 2013.
“We as judges can and should do more.”

A
defendant had pleaded guilty to possessing and sending child
pornography using his computer. The defendant, now in his mid-20s, had
poor mental development as a child and appeared to have been exposed to
drugs in the womb, Judge Weinstein wrote. Placed into the foster care
system, he was repeatedly raped by a foster brother and two separate
foster fathers. Convicted at age 20 for showing child pornography to a
boy, he was raped in prison, both by an individual and by a group of
men. When he was released, he learned he had borderline personality
disorder, depression and agoraphobia.

The defendant was supposed
to be sentenced in June, but he appeared “deeply depressed,” Judge
Weinstein wrote. The judge stopped the hearing, and instead asked the
lawyers to address “whether sentencing this defendant — who has been
raped multiple times — to the statutory minimum sentence of 15 years
violates his right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment,”
especially given the likelihood he would be placed in solitary
confinement as a protection from rape.

Arguments in the case continue.

Also in Brooklyn, Judge John Gleeson, who has criticized prosecutors for using the threat of mandatory-minimum sentences to force defendants into pleas, and pushed them to drop charges so that mandatory minimums would not stack up, turned his attention to the consequences of convictions.

In
1997, a home health aide was raising four children on $783 a month in
Queens. She participated in a staged auto accident “ubiquitous in this
district at the time,” Judge Gleeson wrote, where passengers faked
injuries and went to complicit medical clinics, which billed insurance
companies for procedures that were never performed. The passengers often
filed civil lawsuits, as the woman did, receiving $2,500.

Since
her conviction, she often lost jobs or had offers withdrawn. “People
said I’m very sorry for you. I can’t hired you because criminal
background checked and fingerprint,” she wrote to the probation office
in a handwritten note in 2005 (English is the woman’s second language). A
year later, she wrote, “I don’t like welfare, I like to work.”

Last year, she filed a formal motion asking the judge to expunge the conviction.

The
prosecution opposed her request, arguing that expunging should be
allowed only in extreme circumstances, and this woman’s was not one of
them.

Judge Gleeson disagreed. “The public safety is better
served when people with criminal convictions are able to participate as
productive members of society by working and paying taxes,” he wrote in
granting the woman’s request. “Her case highlights the need to take a
fresh look at policies that shut people out from the social, economic,
and educational opportunities they desperately need in order to re-enter
society successfully.”

In June, another defendant, a nurse, also
asked Judge Gleeson to expunge her 12-year-old conviction in a similar
insurance-fraud scheme. Her lawyer, Mitchell A. Golub, wrote that she
had lost jobs “a half dozen times in just the last two years” because of
it.

As the government prepared its response, Judge Gleeson came
up with a new idea: a certificate of rehabilitation that would show the
defendant was now in good standing. With little legal precedent for
that, he asked the prosecution and a policy expert to weigh in on
whether that was an appropriate solution.

“As a society we really
need to have a serious conversation on this subject of people with
convictions never being able to work again,” Judge Gleeson wrote in an
email. “A strong argument can be made that the answer to this problem
should be more systemic, through legislation, not on a case-by-case
basis in individual judge’s courtrooms.”

ATHENS
— Yanis Varoufakis will not take part in "sad" elections expected next
month in Greece and will instead focus on setting up a new movement to
"restore democracy" across Europe, the former Greek finance minister
told Reuters on Thursday.

The combative, motorbike-riding
academic was sacked as finance minister last month after alienating euro
zone counterparts with his lecturing style and divisive words,
hampering Greece's efforts to secure a bailout from partners.

The
one-time political rockstar has since steadily attacked the bailout
programme that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras subsequently signed up to
and the austerity policies that go with it, rebelling against his former
boss in parliament.

"I'm not going to take part in these sad
elections," Varoufakis told Reuters by telephone when asked about the
vote likely to be held on Sept. 20.

Tsipras's Syriza party, which
hopes to return to power with a strengthened mandate, says it will not
allow Varoufakis and others who voted against the bailout to run for
parliament under the Syriza ticket anyway.

"Not only him but other lawmakers who did not back the bailout will not be part of the ticket," a party official said.

Tsipras
has poured scorn on Varoufakis, telling Alpha TV on Wednesday that he
had realised in June that "Varoufakis was talking but nobody paid any
attention to him" at the height of Greece's negotiations with IMF and
European Union lenders.

"They had switched off, they didn't
listen to what he was saying," Tsipras said. "He didn't say anything bad
but he had lost his credibility among his interlocutors."

Varoufakis,
in turn, likened Tsipras to the mythical Sisyphus condemned to push a
rock uphill only to have it roll back down, telling Australia's ABC
Radio the prime minister had embarked on "pushing the same rock of
austerity up the hill" against the laws of economics and ethical
principles.

The 54-year-old Varoufakis has already dismissed
speculation that he would join the far-left Popular Unity party that
broke away from Syriza last week, telling ABC that he had "great
sympathy" but fundamental differences with them and considered their
stance "isolationist".

Instead, he told Reuters he wanted to set
up a European network aimed at restoring democracy that could eventually
become a party but at the moment was just an idea that he had seen a
lot of support for.

"Instead of having national parties that run
on a national level it will be a European network which is active on a
national level," he said. "It's not something immediate. It's something
slow-burning ... something that gradually grows roots across Europe."